Which factors do brands take consideration before working with an influencer?

In our last blog post, we talked about engagement rate which is one of the factors that brands pay attention before making a collaboration with an influencer. Also, we emphasized that engagement rate is not sole factor and there are other factors too. So, let’s talk about other factors in this blog post.

Follower Number

Although, it is manipulated by follower purchases, the vast majority of small brands look at the influencer’s follower numbers. Brands prefer higher numbers as they believe that high number means higher level of trust. Furthermore, brands want to reach more people and high follower numbers are attractive for them. Today, follower number can easily be faked and to understand if the influencer has real followers or not, brands can control a few things such as follower growth rate, engagement rate and detail examination of follower’s profile.

Engagement Rate

Engagement rate measures how much influencer’s followers react to influencer’s action on social media. Likes and comments on photos, views on reels, swipe-ups on stories are all considered when engagement rate is calculated. So of course high engagement rate is better for the influencer. Engagement rate can be increased artificially by influencers as they are creating groups to do comments and likes on each other’s posts or they organize giveaways. Brands can understand the existence of this type of group by looking comments under the post. If same people are always commenting, click the page of one the commenter an if you see the same people’s comment in his/her photos too, then there is a group.

Content Quality

Content created by influencer should be well enough for technic structure and for style. As technic, it can be defined as visual quality of contents, Photoshop and other support tool usage skills, video editing and cutting skills, colours and music. Of course it is not very fair to expect professional level in technic capacity but you should understand that there is a search for minimum required skills in these areas for brands. For the style, we can say the texts under the contents, emoji, communication language, hashtags and locations are important to use correctly.

Interest

It is not a big surprise when a brands want to collaborate with an influencer which has the same interests with brands operation’s areas. To illustrate it, if you are camping dude then a brand who produces products which you can use in nature, may want to collaborate with you. The logic in here is very simple. Your followers follow you because they have the same interest with you and the brand’s products target group is your followers.

Followers Demographics

With parallel to the interests of influencer’s followers, brands also pay attention to demographic properties of influencer’s followers. Gender, age, location, consumption habits are all important factors for brands as they should reflect and support the target group of the brand.

Previous Collaborations

Brands tend to work with experienced influencers. With looking previous collaborations of influencer, brands can understand what to expect from influencer. Moreover, for brands previous collaborations increase the trust to the influencer. On the other hand, there is an important point in previous collaborations. Brands generally don’t want work with an influence who previously promoted a competitor brand of the brand. For example, if a beauty company wants to work with an influencer, they examine the previous collaborations of the influencer. If the beauty company see another beauty company’s campaign on influencer page, it does not want to work with that influencer because promoting two different brands in same product tail can harm influencer’s reliability.

Influencer her/himself

Other factor that brands give importance is the influencer her/himself. Nowadays, brands have characteristics and images. Brands can be innovative, aggressive, traditional, liberal or wild. If the personality (lifestyle beliefs, habits, ideas) of the influencer is not suitable with the brand’s personality then it is not good collaborate.

Mainly, brands are considering these factors before making collaborations with influencers. Also most of the big firms have their own KPI’s to evaluate influencers.